I am now working on a book on Richard Yates. What a surprise! There’s a mountain of work to do and I want to get it right but this is all new territory for me. Some people seem to snap out books with apparent ease. Blake Bailey for one. Two masterful biographies and not a big gap between them. Anyway, I will do my best and hope that I can produce something enjoyable as well as informative. Cutting out academic jargon should be easy enough since I don’t go in for it in a big way, but cutting out references is harder; I don’t want to lose the ‘meat of the thing’, if you see what I mean.

Also, what to call it? Now there’s a question…..My external examiner commented that I wasn’t much good at titles and there was I thinking I was brilliant. Any thoughts would be helpful, oh silent readers. Obviously you don’t know the work, but let’s just say it’s an extended critical look at all Yates’s work, or rather, it will be.

It’s been a long and instructive journey, right up to the end. The ‘minor corrections’ I have had to make have shown me how poor my own writing is and that is a shock frankly. I split infinitives with alacrity. I repeat myself. I switch tenses half way through a paragraph. I feel so ashamed.

The good news is that these are minor things, apparently, and my writing and research on Richard Yates’s work went down a storm – so I was told. The first question I was asked in my Viva was what did I now think of Yates’s work, three and a half years after starting the PhD. I had no hesitation in saying that I still pick up Eleven Kinds of Loneliness for pure enjoyment and to remind myself what a great writer I have had the privilege of working with.

So that’s that. A chapter of a life complete and I do feel a sense of achievement though inevitably I wish I could have done it better – fewer split infinitives for one thing! Now, what you may well ask: perhaps I will try to turn it into a book. There should be interest bearing in mind schools and universities are teaching Yates.

This is where you come in. If you are a student (or a teacher) and have been dropping in on my blog, could you let me know what your school is (wherever it is): the name, the place and what you have been studying in the way of Yates. If I need proof he is being taught the more of you that do that the more proof I will have. I won’t publish your responses unless you want me to. I know DeWitt Henry has been teaching Yates at Emerson College in Boston and I know he is being taught at Ipswich School in the UK and at Sherborne School also in the UK but you will agree that that is hardly proof of anything. So please get back to me!

Off to nurse a bad back now but I look forward to hearing from you all………

So to bring you up to date, I’ve submitted my thesis for examination and nervously await my examining Viva. I have no idea when it will be. Since February, when I submitted, I haven’t dared even look at my work. I did re-read an article I wrote for an online journal of some repute and I didn’t find it impressive; I had shied away from saying the difficult things which now annoys me a lot. It was just all a bit ‘safe’. I think my negative thoughts about Yates’s writing about women and their sexuality involved very explicit writing – on his part – and therefore need similar scrutiny on mine. I just didn’t feel able to do that in an article – pathetic! It is all in my thesis though.

In the meantime, I’ve been taking a break from all things Yatesian but I have been reading some of the work of Alice Munro who I understand ‘rates’ Yates and has for a long time: so not completely leaving Yates behind! I absolutely love her work and can see lots of links with Yates’ work not least in the way she uses and fictionalises her own biography: The View from Castle Rock and Runaway were my entry points but  Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is a sublime collection of writing. I now have Too Much Happiness waiting for me. Canada and it’s landscape just comes alive as does a very unique authorial voice.

Enough for now but I’ll be back….

I’m currently putting the finishing touches to a piece about Yates’s fictional treatment of women; it’s too long and so I have to cut it down but here’s a taster:

In all his fiction, Yates explores a world in which women live diminished lives; while not overtly championing women’s right to work, nor indeed their domestic rights, Yates observes that society restricts women and interrogates the forms of those restrictions. (With the publication of The Feminine Mystique, 1963 is normally regarded as the date when ‘the problem that had no name’ was addressed and I use it therefore as an indicator of change even if that view now seems simplistic.) By focussing on Sarah Grimes’s thwarted desire to write, or Rachel Drake’s (Cold Spring Harbor) determination to get married in order not to break the cardinal rule that forbade sex before marriage (Jessica Weiss addresses this issue, indicating that the desire to have sex was, in the fifties, a powerful inducement to marriage: ‘Bowing to or upholding social conventions that frowned on premarital sex, couples married early in part because they were eager for sexual intimacy.’ (Weiss, To Have and To Hold, p.24), Yates highlights the terms of their controlled lives. What he does not do, however, is suggest that women were, in any organised fashion, becoming articulate about their situation. In that sense he stands apart from the terms of many of the retrospective sociological commentaries. Wini Breines, for instance, prefaces her book with these words:

The feminism of the past twenty-five years enables us to see that white, middle-class girls who were taught in the 1950s that their main goals in life were to become wives and mothers only ambivalently internalized these values and sometimes rejected them outright, embracing instead a wider world.(Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable, p. ix)

Rather than adopting a radical standpoint which would have marked him down as an early feminist of the second wave, Yates explores women’s uncertainty about their role in his fiction. Of course, his explorations come from a male perspective but the ambivalence of his standpoint was indicative of the uncertainty and confusion of the era. Whatever their intellectual or rational selves taught them about the way forward for the division of labour within the home, for instance, men and women ‘valued traditional family patterns and followed a traditional…course’ (Weiss, p.69); as Jessica Weiss expresses it, ‘norms of masculinity and femininity still tethered these postwar couples.’ (Weiss, p.31)

The Easter Parade (1976), suggests his increasing awareness of the difficulties of life for women as his story is centred on the struggles of his female protagonist, Emily Grimes, and her older sister Sarah.  Both sisters try to become writers and for different reasons fail in this ambition.  Their thwarted desire to write is just one of the ways that Yates uses to indicate how men, threatened by female ambition, hold back the women they live with. As Elaine Showalter indicates in her chapter on the 50s, ‘women writers tended to be isolated in their rooms, homes, and marriages.’ (Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers, p.393) At the same time, Yates also weaves domestic violence into this novel, suggesting an understanding of the vulnerability of women within marriage that should be noted.  Furthermore, Yates’s inclusion of abortion in several stories, notably Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, suggests attentiveness to, and sensitivity towards, the wider political debate about the rights of women.

As I have indicated, Yates’s work reinforces a contemporary revisionist view that sees the fifties, not the sixties, as the time when women’s rights became a new part of the socio-political agenda. However, I do not, and could not, argue that Yates was a proto-feminist: he was not.  There is a real split between Yates’s intellectual appreciation of how life is peculiarly difficult for women within marriages that constrain them or diminish them and his emotional distaste for anything that smacks of a political move to address those issues.  Blake Bailey draws some attention to Yates’s feelings on the subject, when, in the early 1970s, his second wife Martha was thinking of leaving him:

Largely to spare his feelings, she’d spoken in rather vague terms about wanting to “find herself,” and Yates concluded that she’d become a “womens’-libbing bitch” as he sometimes put it.  He couldn’t speak calmly on the subject; partly, perhaps, because his mother’s “independence” had caused him so much grief, Yates’s hatred for all “feminist horseshit” bordered on the pathological. (Bailey, A Tragic Honesty, 2003 p.429)

The contradictoriness of his attitude towards women and their role in life is evident here. His observations about gender roles in his fictions only make sense if one understands that his views were not driven by ideological concerns. Noticing how constrained they were, Yates felt women should be able to work and have a life independent of the home: feeling the effects of this in his own life, he felt they should still put the concerns and needs of their husbands first; to do less was to earn his contempt.

In his fictions, despite much interest in the plight of the ‘diminished female’, scorn is heaped on both feminists and postmodernists alike and it is with some relish that he fuses the two in his fourth novel The Easter Parade. Emily is invited to a party, a grim affair with no single men, but the hosts tell her about Trudy, their neighbour, who gives masturbation classes to lonely women: ‘Sort of the ultimate in radical feminism. Who needs men?‘ (TEP, p.215) the host dryly observes. Emily goes along with others to see Trudy’s studio and finds herself looking at ‘what looks like a sculptured sunburst of many podlike aluminum shapes’ (Ibid., p.216), cast, Trudy explains, from her students’ vaginas. ‘There were no more parties’,(Ibid.)Yates writes. As Bailey points out, this ‘elliptical leap…nicely summarizes his attitude toward radical feminism.’ (Blake Bailey http://www.slate.com/id/2207635/pagenum/all/#p2) Women independent of men was something Yates was both contemptuous of and feared; he expressed similar contempt towards homosexuality with equally conflicting results. Despite highlighting the homophobia prevalent in the fifties in a story such as ‘A Clinical Romance’, or in his depiction of artists in Young Hearts Crying, Monica Yates, in a recent interview with Yates’s daughters, recalls his horrified reaction when she suggested that she might join the army: “Everyone in the army is lesbians! You can’t go in the army, baby.” (Kate Charlton-Jones, ‘Living on Revolutionary Road, The Times, Jan. 24th 2009  http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article5573136.ece)

April’s argument for going to Paris is predicated on her fierce belief in Frank; she believes that her high opinion of him and the kind of man he could be is universally shared: ‘But if you mean who ever said you were exceptional, if you mean who ever said you had a first-rate original mind – well my God, Frank, the answer is everybody.’The irony of this is impressed on the reader as Yates explores Frank’s idiomatic thoughts, thoughts which reveal his weakness and vanity (‘Had Bill Croft really said that?’). He cannot win the argument without demolishing April’s high opinion of who he is and of who she has married but this is not within his capabilities. Thus the ‘note of honest doubt’ that he thinks he might have heard in her voice is immediately countered by his acquiescence that, ‘“Okay, let’s say I was a promising kid.”’ Furthermore, as he develops his posturing, ‘his voice had taken on a resonance that made it every bit as theatrical as hers. It was the voice of a hero’. Far from condemning Frank for this inability to put his wife straight, Yates offers up his fallibility as a man to a reader who might very well recognise that with such small dishonesties all marriages are weakened. With these small indicators of human, and particularly male, posturing, Yates critiques notions of heroism in its contemporary form. Through several of his male protagonists, he suggests that the mid-twentieth century ‘hero’ is a pastiche of Hollywood lead actors; he has all the substantiality of a male in an advertising campaign and we are invited to watch him flounder as he checks his image in mirrors, adjusts his voice just as he adjusts his hair,  postures and preens. This is one remove from Fitzgerald’s flawed men who have heroic stature; the fallen idols of romance novels and classic film; Yates’s men never get close to heroic.

While his characters are never heroes, Yates observes how the ordinary man will borrow slithers of heroic fabric to coat his otherwise average behaviour. So here, Frank’s voice alters as he sees potential in himself and in the moment.  Yates uses moments such as this one with Frank to indicate the gap that exists between how his protagonist wants to be seen and how he is seen; usually it is the reader, rather than the other characters, who does the real ‘seeing’. The gap his females have to negotiate is typified here by April. It is, Yates suggests, a difference encouraged by a society that asks its females to take second place to their male partners and to place a greater value on their needs and their ideas of themselves. While loneliness, dissatisfaction and resentment characterize April’s life, domestically imprisoned as she feels herself to be in their neat little home, the reader is aware that the real danger for April comes from the construction of Frank she has made in her mind. At this stage in the novel, we have seen that Frank has to face ‘the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny’ but we have not yet seen April confront the reality of the man she is trying  to put on a pedestal (and society would appear to be encouraging her in this). As she learns to face up to the truth of who Frank is, and, therefore, to the truth about the shifting sands of their marriage, Yates suggests, with her tragic end, that that reality is too much to bear.

I suspect that’s why A Special Providence is a weak book – one of the reasons, anyway. It’s not properly formed; I never did achieve enough fictional distance on the character of Robert Prentice. (Ploughshares interview, 1972)

Re-working the main character of his 1962 short story, ‘Builders’, a protagonist Yates acknowledged as, ‘clearly and nakedly myself’ (ibid.), Robert Prentice’s wartime experiences and his experiences trying to free himself from his cloying and dependent mother, form the central drama of the story. While Yates was, in this novel, clearly trying to continue the ‘autobiographical blowout’ (ibid.) he’d begun with ‘Builders’, I would suggest that the weakness of the book is not just Yates’s lack of distance from Robert Prentice but encompasses his portrayal of Robert’s mother, Alice Prentice, as well. While Yates felt that with ‘Builders’ he’d ‘managed to avoid both of the two terrible traps that lie in the path of autobiographical fiction, self-pity and self-aggrandizement’ (ibid.) it seems that both traps awaited him in this, his second novel, and not just in the portrait of the protagonist. Alice is an archetype of all Yates’s mother figures, seemingly the closest he came to creating a portrait of his own mother Dookie and, in that respect, Yates, driven by both his love for, and antipathy towards, Dookie, diminishes and caricatures her.

Blake Bailey includes an interesting vignette about the complexity of this relationship:

Once, when Yates was responding to questions about his work, a young woman commented on how awful the mother was in A Special Providence – “so careless and thoughtless and self-centred” – and asked Yates what he thought of her. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I guess I sort of love her.” (A Tragic Honesty, p.36)

While we can’t fail to see the poignancy of Alice’s predicament, a single woman, impoverished and self-deluding in her social ambitions, we don’t as readers achieve the same level of empathy with her  that Yates achieves with some of his other portraits of mothers (although any empathy with have for his mother figures is highly circumscribed). Blake Bailey acknowledges that this failure of distance is most evident in Yates’s maternal figures:

‘Yates’s compassion for human weakness, for the flaws that make failure so inevitable, is everywhere in his work – with the occasional exception of certain characters based on his mother’ (Ibid.p.17). However, I take issue with Bailey’s exception to this claim, when he suggests that Alice is ‘rounded and essentially forgiveable’. For me, Alice Prentice is the ‘Dickensian grotesque’ that Bailey sees more clearly drawn in Yates’s other novels.

In the long Prologue to A Special Providence, Yates describes Robert Prentice’s leave from the army in 1944. Deciding to spend the time with his mother, he makes the long journey from the camp in Virginia to New York. Prentice is alarmed to find his mother living in near squalor and penury but continuing to borrow money and drinking heavily. Using the metaphor of the movies (a metaphor that he overworks in this novel), Yates indicates how Prentice makes life more palatable by seeing ‘himself as the hero of some inspiring movie about the struggles of the poor.’ (ASP, p.10) The problem for him is, ‘that his mother refused to play her role’, as we see here:

He kept hoping to come home and find her acting the way he thought she ought to act: a humble widow, gratefully cooking meat and potatoes for her tired son, sitting down with a sewing basket as soon as she’d washed the dishes, darning his socks in the lamplight and perhaps looking up to inquire, shyly, if he wouldn’t like to call up some girl.

While ironically drawing attention to Prentice’s traditionally inflected understanding of appropriate male and female roles, as he visualises the adoring, attentive mother, dutifully taking care of all the housework and dancing attendance on a son who has been out to earn a living to support them both, Yates subtly suggests the problematic nature of their relationship. With Prentice’s imagining, Yates both sets up an ideal and demolishes it as a possibility as he then describes her subsequent behaviour. He captures the growing emotional distance between the protagonist and his mother, a distance compounded and exaggerated by her emotional response. Following an argument about money, for instance, an argument that Alice is not able to win, she has the first of several tantrums we witness: ‘And she burst into tears. As if shot, she then clutched her left breast and collapsed full length on the floor, splitting an armpit seam of the dress…’ Ridiculous in its extravagance and both grotesque and immature in its attempt to manipulate, Alice’s behaviour alienates her son and the reader. Beyond the gap in communication and behaviour highlighted between these two people, the ideal that Robert Prentice has imagined is an ideal of marital, not filial, devotion; by ascribing such an ideal to Prentice, Yates indicates a basic problem in the nature of their relationship, a problem, he suggests throughout the text, that seals their fate.

The problem of domineering mothers, and of mothers that control and manipulate their sons, occurs time and again in his fictions with intertextual resonances that create a clear indication of how Yates viewed motherhood and felt deeply the failings of his own mother. The shades of inappropriate behaviour on behalf of the mother are hard to miss, as is indicated by one particular image in A Special Providence, that of a sculptress mother using her child as a model. In this novel, the small naked boy is made to endure both discomfort and humiliation as the mother in question attends to her own needs, invading her child’s privacy and attacking his dignity. He is laughed at and belittled when his little friends peer into the barn where his mother has her studio. Although Alice is described as seeing ‘Bobby round-eyed with humiliation, hunched over with both hands hiding his genitals’, (ASP, p.133) she doesn’t register his shame and gets him to carry on posing. Both the reader, and the boy, looking back, experience this as a form of grotesque selfishness and insensitivity coming as it does after he has been observed and laughed at by ‘three or four pairs of eyes peering in through an inch-wide crack in the wallboards.’ According to Bailey, ‘Dookie’s favorite model for her faunlets, often posed in the nude, was the small, obliging Richard’. (Bailey, ATH, p.21) There is something so deeply poignant about Yates’s rendition of this idiosyncratic event in A Special Providence that one almost doesn’t need the confirming detail from Bailey that this event mirrored exactly his own experience.

I am only two thirds of the way through my first reading but I am getting up early and staying awake late to keep reading. The prose is poetic without ever being overdone; the observations about human behaviour are so precise, so detailed and breathtakingly sharp; the shift in narrative view, and the gap between the inner and outer person, all carefully and dynamically conveyed. And then there’s the debate about Man and his beliefs threaded throughout, like an argument the author is having with himself, that strikes me as being so like Wallace Stevens’s work. It’s all a very different perspective on the family from the one Yates gives and makes for some interesting comparisons.

I want to know more about James Agee….Have any of you read any of his work, prose or poetry? Is there a biography? I only have the information that Wikipedia provides and it is’t much.

I have to thank my friend Mark for putting me on to this work and I look forward to finding time to read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

In ‘The Best of Everything’, Yates directs his readers’ sympathies to his female protagonist, Grace. While Grace, as we have seen earlier in the story, is directed by those around her, and propelling towards a romantic and idealised view of what is about to happen, Ralph is also seen as nervous, unwilling and far happier with ‘the lads’; it is the lads who move him to tears, the lads who touch him with their surprise party and their wonderful gift. His first loyalties are to his best friend Eddie and, not for the first time in a Yates story, suggest an element of homoeroticism that the story leaves unexplored: ‘Eddie was his best friend’ and ‘Half the fun of every date – even more than half – had been telling Eddie about it afterwards’. Such phrases suggest not just Ralph’s closeness to Eddie but his dependence on him, a closeness, dependence and comfort that we read in opposition to his aloof attitude towards his future bride. Furthermore, Yates slows his narrative to describe with great precision the moment when Eddie presents Ralph with his wedding present in a way that draws quiet attention to the intensity of emotion between these two men; ‘Then the crowd cleaved in half, and Eddie made his way slowly down the middle. His eyes gleamed in a smile of love, and from his bashful hand hung the suitcase’. Reading like a parody of a bridal march, Yates’s description further reminds us of the gaps between his actual bride and his ‘best friend’. But it is not just Ralph against whom we read Grace: her friend and roommate’s snobbery forms another dialectic in this tale as Martha mimics and parodies Ralph’s speech – ‘“Isn’t he funny?” Martha had said after their first date. “He says ‘terlet.’ I didn’t know people really said ‘terlet.’”’ – as well as his cultural background; “Oh, and all those friends of his, his Eddie and his Marty and his George with their mean, ratty little clerks’ lives and their mean, ratty little…”

Yates captures the gap between male and female experience of marriage and courtship and underlies the fear for both genders about the step into the unknown that they are about to take, but it is to the isolate and disempowered that we are drawn. Grace, unaware of the surprise party Eddie has thrown for him, a party which he is desperate to return to, greets Ralph at the door in the expensive negligee she has bought for their honeymoon. Barely even noticing her provocative garb, seductive tone, or the promise of some unencumbered pre-marital sex, that they all imply, Ralph brushes past her: ‘“Hi, baby.” He brushed past her and walked inside. “Guess I’m late, huh? You in bed?”’ His quick-fire snappy dialogue is beautifully contrasted with her languid movements as, mimicking the seduction techniques of Hollywood starlets, ‘She closed the door and leaned against it with both hands holding the doorknob at the small of her back, the way heroines close doors in the movies.’ When Ralph finally notices her negligee, his response to it is characteristically vulgar and further emphasises the lack of any emotional investment in their partnership; ‘“Nice,” he said, feeling the flimsy material between thumb and index finger, like a merchant. “Very nice. Wudga pay fa this, honey?”’

Brilliant, in my view. Is there a better example of such a communication gap in the writing of, or about, the 1950s? Let me know….

Yates’s writing displays a prescient awareness of gender politics but, as with all his political commentary, his expression of this consciousness is fused into his broader narratives. In his early work, work written up to and including Revolutionary Road‘s publication in 1961, Yates’s depiction of the struggles men, and more particularly women, encounter, both within and outside the home, prefigure some of the concerns adopted by the second wave of feminism.  Although Yates’s work was not propelled by an interest in sexual politics, he wrote about what he knew and observed, thus producing insights that now seem ahead of their time and at cross-purposes with how America wanted to see itself.  Although he was not alone in doing this, the issues he drew attention to did not become part of mainstream thinking until after the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 – even if, as several contemporary social historians suggest, the ideas Friedan included in her book had been around long before 1963; Friedan gave voice and recognition, so they now argue, to attitudes already quite established. Yates’s early work, written during the mid-fifties (as all but one of the stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness were), seems to suggest our contemporary historians are right; the ideas were around and Yates picked up on them, incorporating many quite radical ideas into his fiction.

In his later work, he went on to develop his investigation into how women inhabit a proscribed space in life.  The Easter Parade (1976), his fourth novel, suggests his increasing awareness of this issue as his story is centred on the struggles of his female protagonist, Emily Grimes, and her older sister Sarah.  Both sisters try to become writers and for different reasons fail in this ambition.  Since the only consolation Yates ever seems to find in life is in writing, it seems doubly significant that these women fail in their ambition to be writers. Being prevented from writing, as Sarah is, would seem to be tantamount to stealing the soul of an individual in Yates’s eyes, stealing not just their imaginative potential but the dreams that give them hope.

In the course of his narrative Yates suggests how men, threatened by female ambition, hold back the women they live with.  At the same time, Yates also weaves into this novel his awareness of domestic violence, suggesting an understanding of the vulnerability of women within marriage that should be noted.  Furthermore, Yates’s inclusion of abortion in several stories, notably Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, suggests attentiveness to, and sensitivity towards, the political debate about the rights of women.  However, I do not, and could not, argue that Yates was a proto-feminist: he was not.  There are bad young mothers in his fiction too – look at ‘Saying Goodbye to Sally’. There is a real split between Yates’s intellectual appreciation of how life is peculiarly difficult for women within marriages that constrain them or diminish them and his emotional distaste for anything that smacks of a political move to address those issues.  Blake Bailey draws some attention to Yates’s feelings on the subject, when, in the early 1970s, his second wife Martha was thinking of leaving him:

Largely to spare his feelings, she’d spoken in rather vague terms about wanting to “find herself,” and Yates concluded that she’d become a “womens’-libbing bitch” as he sometimes put it.  He couldn’t speak calmly on the subject; partly, perhaps, because his mother’s “independence” had caused him so much grief, Yates’s hatred for all “feminist horseshit” bordered on the pathological. (Bailey, p.429)

And then, of course, there are all the failing older women of his fiction. Coming from his emotional dislike and resentment of his own mother, the portraits of these women – Pookie, Gloria Drake et al – they seem to dominate but shouldn’t obscure what he is also saying about the politics of womanhood.

Re-reading this novel has been fascinating. No, it’s not as good as Revolutionary Road or The Easter Parade but there are some very, very good bits. The war writing is so vivid and so honest. Prentice stumbles about in a fog of ignorance and illness in ways that not only mirror Yates’s own youth and tubercular struggles but must mirror those of so many other young men, drafted abroad after only six weeks training and still unsure which end of  a gun to hold. His desperate desire to find friends, while only further annoying all those around him, his clumsiness and lack of natural athleticism, his thoughts about his Mum (though always aware of how irritating she is), and the visceral sense of how grim and frightening the whole experience was and how alone he was with his fear, is all so realistically and, as I said, honestly, conveyed. He doesn’t write about big battles, huge vaguely honourable duties to eliminate the enemy: he writes about little skirmishes – of which there must have been hundreds of thousands – when you could barely tell who was friend and who was foe. It’s the minutiae of war not the grand picture.

Where this book is weaker is in the lack of a control, a sense of control we see in most of his other fiction. He overuses the movie-metaphor for instance, making it stand out as a tool for his art, rather than as he did in RR, or in his short stories, allowing it to blend organically with the experience being described.